BUSINESS- Elon Musk has admitted that the Twitter buyout was not as smooth as expected and that it was “quite painful”. He said the deal and the months leading up to it were “very stressful”.
In an interview with BBC, the mercurial businessman went on to say that Twitter is “roughly” breaking even and that he would sell the company if he finds the right person.
He said the buyout was far from boring, let alone a ” holiday”. The billionaire stressed that “the scope of the pain has been extremely high”, noting that one of the reasons for this was the difficulty of reducing the workforce from 8,000 to 1,500 employees. An 80 per cent downsizing brought him a lot of criticism, but he said it was the only way for the company to survive the crisis it was facing.
The entrepreneur, who is also in charge of the car manufacturer Tesla and the company SpaceX, bought the social network for 44 billion dollars last October. Speaking about Twitter’s finances, Musk said the company is now at the “break-even point”, as most of its advertisers have returned.
Musk claimed that “the site is working” and that things are going “reasonably well”. However, they also added that their workload is excessively high. On the issue of verified blue checkmarks, Musk explained that they would be removed from accounts by the end of next week, in order to implement the new payment system.
“Also on 13 February we will stop using the Premium API. If you are a Premium subscriber, you can request Enterprise to continue using these endpoints,” the @TwitterDev account posted.
